Improving health service provision — including reducing acute and elective service wait times — and reducing barriers to achieving good health across the population, are key organisational goals for the Bay of Plenty DHB in 2009.

CIO Owen Wallace says key ICT focus areas are the improvement of clinical information systems to enable improved healthcare provision, working with colleague DHBs and other organisations on collaborative ICT initiatives — for example in the areas of telecommunications, common infrastructures and shared applications — and improved ICT infrastructure.

“The latter serves to enhance performance, provide certainty and provide value for money. A good example is server and storage consolidation and network robustness,” says Wallace.

IT budgets and IT staff numbers for 2009 have been held at 2008 levels, but BoP DHB is pushing forward with several ICT initiatives. These include completion of PACS/RIS (a multi-year, multi-DHB project), commencing the second stage of a Clinical Information System Project; and a tiered storage and archiving project.

Other IT projects areas are unified communications, along with business continuity and disaster recovery upgrades. Software and server consolidation and virtualisation are ongoing.

BoP DHB financial systems are outsourced to the Canterbury District Health Board — all other ICT functions are managed in-house.

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